[Chris Evans]

I would love to help you, but I just don’t quite understand everything you are trying to do. I get the product and the camera movement, but what kind of video green screen are you talking about? Do you have a piece of footage that you want to be a sphere? Do you have various piece of footage that you want to make a circle?

If you could include a picture, that might help.

Maybe someone else will understand better than me.

[Chris Evans]

What you have is actually pretty good. Add some great sounds and I think you’ve got a pretty good product.

The light rays in the legendary Pictures could be made with just a simple fractal noise, a mask, directional blur, and some glow (probably many other ways to make the same thing also). Make the layer 3d and put it in a crack.

For the texture, I would probably find a good metal texture, make a new comp, add some red, large fractal noise, use Add transfer mode (fiddle with it to get it to look good) and use that comp as a custom texture map.

Add some 3d text flying in and you’ve got it.

That being said, make something creative. Take their idea and change it to make if your own! More original work is always better.

[Chris Evans]

If you click on the name of the Output Module, it will open a dialog box with export settings and the default on my iMac for h.264 is 3 Mbps, which is quite low and is probably causing you problems.

In that dialog box with the h.264 Output Module selected, all your video settings should be fine (at the bottom, make sure you have our audio output checked if you have audio), but if you click the “Format Options” button, it will open a new dialog box where you can change some more settings. Make sure your profile is set to High or Main, leave the Level alone, but change the Target Bitrate to at least 15 and the Maximum just a few above that. You could probably go up to a target of 20 or even 30 and still be fine, the only reason not to go that high is if you are extremely limited on space or if your video has a lot of large blank areas, in which case you don’t need the higher bitrate.

Hope that helps!

[Chris Evans]

If you go to the Preview window in After effects (Usually near the top right) and check “From Current Time”, it will start playing the RAM Preview from the playhead.

OR

What I do is I just set my work area (the light grey bar with yellow/orange handles on either side at the top of your timeline) to just the part I’m working and it will only RAM Preview what is in the Work Area. Then I don’t have to remember to move my time indicator to where I want it to render from. Then just move it forward as I work through the video.

Pre-rendering is the term using a proxy (usually of a pre-comp). Just google proxy in after effects and you’ll find a lot of information and tutorials.

[Chris Evans]

It’s great to see new people being interested in After Effects. Kinetic Typography is one of the funnest things to create in after effects because you can really unleash your creativity. However, it can use some of the most complicated aspects of After Effects.

After Effects is huge. Massive. However, the learning curve is equally as massive. Start with the basics. Just google “After Effects Basics” or “Tutorials”. Get to know AE, then just google Kinetic Typography Tutorial.

I started here for my basics: https://www.videocopilot.net/basic/
(It’s created using an older version, but everything carries over)

Here are some great tutorials on Kinetic Typography (actually just the first 3 on youtube, but still good). Each of them shows some different ways to create it. The first one has some important keyboard shortcuts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itoF1SVWzFE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOi5P1qxrM4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fosrj5wJNIs

There are no effects or plugins to create Kinetic Typography, it’s all done manually and time consumingly, but that is how all great and original content is made.

That video is a great example of the variety of things you can do with After Effects and creating Kinetic Typography, but that was all done by hand. Individually animating every single word or groups using pre-comps and/or null objects.

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[Chris Evans]

I’ve learned nearly everything I know about After Effects from Andrew Kramer over at Video Copilot (he used to be on the Cow.

Here are the basics (made on an older version, but almost everything carries over)
https://www.videocopilot.net/basic/

And a huge selection of tutorials.
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/

Watch them all even if you don’t think you’ll need to know it because there are many other things in each tutorial that will help you with everything.

[Chris Evans]

Environment Maps really need to be Equirectangular (2:1). However, in this case, it shouldn’t really matter.

I’m working on a project right now and I’m dealing with a lot of reflections using an environment almost exactly like yours, but I’m not getting the same reflection problem you are. So I created a new project and duplicated your project (using a cube instead of an iPhone) and I got the same problem. Element has it’s own map size limit in the preferences of the Scene Setup window and the problem still occurs with it at max res there, however I noticed that the reflection was smooth where the environment map looped (where the right side of your environment map meets the left side in the sphere). That is what I think I did on accident.

However, I figured it out. Don’t make your environment map have a diagonal line, use a horizontal or vertical line. Even at the low res of the environment map, a vertical or horizontal line will look smooth. Just rotate your environment in the Render Settings. You could also move your camera closer and zoom out to get a larger sample of the environment off the the reflection.

[Chris Evans]

Thanks John,

The project you posted was exactly what I was looking for and I will use it for my project. I hadn’t thought of feathering the mask.

I wrote the above portion and decided to use your suggestion in my project before I posted it, but I found that if I feathered the mask too much (which I did while I was just fiddling it with it to get exactly what I needed, I wasn’t going to use it that way) I got the same result as with the directional blur. When that happened, I increased the brightness with curves and hovered my mouse over different parts and I noticed that in the black regions at the edge of my white the info panel said that the RGB values were all 225, but it was showing black on my screen. Then it hit me, it was the Alpha channel! Increasing the brightness doesn’t change the alpha channel, but I can modify the Alpha channel with curves and it works exactly like I want it to.

I guess it just took some more playing around. Thanks for your help though.